Yeah, thanks Paul, good work, I hope to be ordering some FPV stuff soon. Just hope Bruce gets into gear on the welding mask set-up, as I can't afford any fancy goggles right now...and from what he says, the LCD's in his rig will have better resolution anyway.

Well done paul. I went up as well today but really hesitated because yesterday and today we worked hard cutting firewood and planting a few hundred natives.

But happy I went up. The camera on the phoenix 2000 is now rotating (pan) 180 degrees as per an earlier posted servo mod while the tild has a basic safety build in but needs perfecting. I put some tuffies (woolen threads) on the wing to test if I can record the stall speed more accurately. This went well and moments before stall, the tuffies start to shake and come loose from the wing just like feathers on a landing goose. At stall the they blow forward and the nose dives, usually with a wingdrop. Unfortunately there was quite a bit of wind and ground speed is no good as a reference. But another 20 minutes of filming and looking nearly straight down puts another dimension to the FPV experience. I use the KX171 camera and also enjoy a pretty good picture. While running the motor and looking straight ahead I can tune the rpm so that the prop is nearly stationary.

I'll have a look at the OSD after this because I do think my system (AP117) has the drawback that the onscreen has no custom setup. But how much more should I spend! I think I first teach myself to put stuff on youtube.

Thanks rogueqd, we really had a blast and can't wait to do it again. Thomas said he want's his own FPV gear!!! I think we are well and truly hooked

Sid, we're still waiting on our Goggles to arrive. We actually flew with a 7" LCD display and it worked perfectly and I'm now wondering if one even really needs goggles. Will let you know my thoughts when we get our ones. Purchased them 3 weeks ago from ebay and they've just been posted

Oops that's great to hear! We haven't tried FPV on the phoenix yet but will give it a go when time allows. I think camera pan is a good idea as a few times I didn't go past us far enough for the approach and ended up doing another lap The OSD is really great as specially if you're a newbie to FPV like my son and I. Its hard to tell if the model is stalling, climbing or coming down sometimes and the OSD is great for this. As specially if you want to know if you're maintaining altitude etc. On landing to as you want to make sure you have some degree of forward speed happening

My son said one of my landings was PERFECT (the first one) and the second one I tried to flare too high up and it fell from about 2 feet. Not very graceful and the landing was much better but not as good as the first.

bmsweb wrote:Sid, we're still waiting on our Goggles to arrive. We actually flew with a 7" LCD display and it worked perfectly and I'm now wondering if one even really needs goggles. Will let you know my thoughts when we get our ones. Purchased them 3 weeks ago from ebay and they've just been posted

Interesting. What sort of display was it? I've just been Googling small displays; you can get car reversing-camera type ones from China very cheaply but the resolution is only 480*240. I'd want one that is SVGA (800*600). If I can get a cheap panel that I can hook up to the video Rx I can make my own headset, or just use a darkbox on a tripod.

Edited: Just ordered the 5.8g 200mw FPV Wireless AV Tx & Rx Set and the Sony camera from HobbyKing. I'm so going to do this!

Mine is one of the cheapy low res ones from ebay. I only purchased it for testing as I still haven't decided what I'll use. I'm thinking of using a PC LCD monitor. When I get home, I'll add the link to the one I purchased. Having said that it was still fine to fly with

I've found a reasonably priced higher res LCD monitor that could be used for a darkbox type FPV viewer, or even mounted on a hilariously large headset. It's an 8" SVGA (800* 600) so should display PAL at native resolution (PAL is, from memory, 768 * 576). I'm not familiar with how a PAL signal is tweaked to run on LCD displays, but I guess if you have an AVI composite in from the video Rx, this should work

Also, I have no idea if the HobbyKing FPV system actually does generate 768*576 lines. It may be that a lower res screen works just as well. I'll have to wait till my stuff shows up before I test it on my video capture card on the HD monitor here.

Whatever, finding 7" or smaller SVGA LCD panels that I can use as is, is proving difficult.

For comparison I thought I'd pop in a chart showing standard resolutions and screen ratios for TV's and computer monitors.

Since most commercial headsets use VGA (640*480) I'm guessing that anything better is a waste with this cheap HobbyKing Tx/Rx gear. VGA stuff is easier and cheaper to come by. Time to trawl RCGroups for more info, I guess (groan).

Thanks for that Sid, you just gave me an idea... You prompted the brain cells and my memory flashed to a underwater camera I have somewhere... The camera hangs over the side of the boat on the cable which plugs into the small (probably 7") display... I know it runs off 12v... I'll look it out and see what it does...Thanks..